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Star Struck

This article appears in The Architect’s Newspaper’s April 2017 issue, which takes a deep dive into Florida to coincide with the upcoming AIA Conference on Architecture in Orlando (April 27 to 29). We’re publishing the issue online as the Conference approaches—click here to see the latest articles to be uploaded.

When it comes to theatrical architecture, Disney rarely disappoints. So when it came time to remodel the spherical Planet Hollywood in the Disney Springs Development, it turned to Boston-based Elkus Manfredi Architects to double down on the theme “Dine Amongst the Stars.”

Disney Springs is located near Disney’s collection of theme parks in Orlando, Florida. The recently expanded district is home to retail, dining, and entertainment, all modeled after a centuries-old American town that evolved along an alternate timeline to our own. The remodeled Planet Hollywood was envisioned as a stand-alone destination while still fitting into this fantastical setting.

Leveraging the existing iconic dome of the Planet Hollywood, Elkus Manfredi reimagined the building as an epic late-19th-century observatory. A new brick base, complete with arched windows and truss details, adds 5,000 square feet to the project. A tensile Teflon-coated silver fabric resurfaces the dome, referencing the metal domes of vintage observatories, and completes the thematic exterior transformation. Outdoor seating and an exterior stair, encased in a radio-tower-esque structure with another exterior bar, give guests a whole new set of dining options.

The interior of the spherical building has four levels. At the heart of the space, a mock vintage telescope rises through all three of the main dining and entertainment stories. Throughout the whole project, planetary and stellar motifs adorn everything from the custom carpet to the multimedia screens, but each floor has its own character. The main dining level is large and open, connected to the outdoor terrace overlooking Disney Springs. The second level is more intimate, with a smaller dining area and a lounge area geared toward adults. The top dining level on the fourth floor is the most intimate space in the restaurant. Guests here are closest to the dome and the projected stars on its inner surface.

While the restaurant will no longer sport the familiar 1990s Planet Hollywood branding, that does not mean that everything will be replaced. Multiple displays of Hollywood memorabilia are still part of the project’s experience.

The timing of this transformation seems only appropriate. As NASA continuously announces the finding of exoplanets in neighboring star systems, perhaps this new observatory will help Disney discover its own planet… Hollywood.

Preserving Neighborhood Scale

The West Hollywood Planning Commission (WHPC) has approved a small-scale, 11-unit apartment building designed by Culver City-based R&A Architecture+Design.
The project is designed as an intimate courtyard apartment complex, with a series of two- and three-bedroom units organized around a central, shared open space. The dispersed masses of the complex are clad in a variety of surface materials, including corrugated sheets of aluminum, vertically-oriented wood siding, and expanses of glass. The more solid sections of the building are studded with punched openings that signal windows, doorways, and passageways into the courtyard in a manner that corresponds to the surrounding low-level density of the neighborhood. Units in the project average 1,585-square feet in size, according to a press release, and are connected to various types of outdoor spaces, including rooftop gardens and balconies. The project is designed to facilitate natural cross-ventilation via the courtyard, exterior staircases, and unit doors that are clad in louvers and screens. The units are also designed with concrete floors throughout that will act as thermal massing for each home.
Christian Robert, principal at R&A explained the contextual massing of the project in a press release, saying, “(the) segmented massing respects the scale of nearby homes. As architects, we thoughtfully pay attention to the context and work to maintain the community spirit.”
The intense contextual focus of the project is no mistake on the part of the designers, as the project comes on the heels of several controversial developments in the city, like the Gehry Associates-designed 8150 Sunset project. Recent, density-oriented projects have rankled locals in the densifying municipality and across the Los Angeles region. Los Angeles voters recently defeated a controversial and anti-development measure that sought to curb new housing production in the city, but a weariness toward dense development has taken root nonetheless.Construction on the R&A Design project is scheduled to begin spring 2018.

Walk Around Town

Areas around the only heavy rail transit stop in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley are poised to change dramatically as a new plan calling for the addition of over 1,500 residential units to the area coalesces.
The redevelopment plan—orchestrated as a joint proposal by developers Trammell Crow Company, Greenland USA, Cesar Chavez Foundation, architects Gensler, and landscape architects Melendrez—also aims to bring roughly 450,000-square feet of offices and 150,000-square feet of ground-level commercial spaces to a collection of lots owned by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (L.A. Metro) surrounding the North Hollywood Red Line station. The plans will also consolidate a series of bus turnaround areas around the station into a single transfer complex.
Urbanize LAreports that the plan, to be detailed in an upcoming presentation by the development to L.A. Metro’s San Fernando Valley Service Council (SFVSC), comes after Trammell Crow and Greenland had initially proposed two competing schemes.
A rendering of the proposed project showcases a collection of mixed-use towers surrounding a series of open plaza areas and the new bus turnaround. The renderings depict the tallest tower as a podium-style structure located at the northern corner of the site, with a much shorter, perimeter block structure topped with a green roof standing beside it. The back corner of the site is populated by several courtyard apartment building complexes and a mid-rise housing tower. Another tall tower will be located on a corner opposing the main portion of the development.
The complex is designed as a Transit Oriented Community (TOC), a notion that builds on transit-accessibility at the core of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) projects by including “holistic community development” that engages not only with mass transit but also facilitates pedestrian activities, according to the report that will be shown to the SFVSC. The plan comes out of a series of community scoping meetings conducted by L.A. Metro and the developers that uncovered historic preservation of the surrounding NoHo Arts District and balance between height, density, and pedestrianism as major community concerns.
As such, the development will aim to engage and building upon existing street life in the pedestrian-heavy node while also adding generous paseos between various structures to create pedestrian paths around the station. The project will also include an unspecified number of affordable housing units.
A detailed timeline for the project has not been released.

Mid-Rise to the Occasion

Filings with the Los Angeles Department of City Planning (LADCP) indicate that Los Angeles-based architects Brooks+Scarpa are working on a new, 60-unit mixed-use project in the city’s North Hollywood neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.
The LADCP documents indicate that the new five-story, mixed-use project will contain six units dedicated to Very Low Income Households and 2,826 square feet of ground floor commercial space. The complex will also contain one level of underground parking with 90 parking stalls. The building is being designed to a maximum height of 60 feet and will contain 44 one-bedroom units, 12 studio units, and 4 two-bedroom units. It will also feature a collection of shared leisure spaces, including a central courtyard, outdoor deck area, and a community room.
The complex is articulated as a building mass extruded from the footprint of the building. That mass is carved away in certain areas, particularly along southern and northern exposures—Camarillo and Bakman Streets, respectively—where the facade gives way to generous, interior courtyard areas. The Camarillo Street frontage contains the largest openings, creating a street-fronting, three-story plaza located above the building’s retail level. Distinctively, the building’s fifth level caps the front facade, creating a large entry portal to the building’s interior. The complex features tall and narrow bands of casement windows and sliding doors and is clad throughout in a white, corrugated aluminum screen wall system.
The San Fernando Valley, a densely-populated and diverse region north of Downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood, is currently seeing a boom in the construction of mid-rise, mixed-use projects, including the conversion of an outdated Westfield Corporation shopping mall by HKS Architects, Johnson Fain, and Togawa Smith Martin Architects and the development of permanent supportive housing for formerly homeless individuals by the Skid Row Housing Trust and Michael Maltzan Architects.
This Brooks+Scarpa project is located adjacent to the Red Line subway line and Orange Line Bus Rapid Transit line. Developers HL Capital Holdings II have not released a construction timeline for the project.

Living LARGE

Los Angeles—based firm LARGE Architecture and developer Related California have released a new batch of renderings for 1755 Argyle, a midcentury modern-influenced, 18-story mixed-use residential tower project in Hollywood, California. The project would bring 114 market-rate apartments, 2,100 square feet of commercial space, and a five-level, 201-stall parking garage to the fast-growing neighborhood. The tower is expected to contain a mix of studio, one-, and two-bedroom units. Plans for the tower also call for an integrated fitness center and swimming pool lounge area. Based on renderings from the firm’s website, 1755 Argyle is articulated as a striated monolith, with zigzagging floor plates projecting from the floor-to-ceiling glass curtain walls that wrap the building on all sides. These projecting floor plates give the tower an intricate, geometric appearance and are designed to function as exterior balconies for the housing units contained within. A fifth-floor terrace located above the project’s parking podium contains outdoor amenities for the tower, including a swimming pool and lounge spaces.The project is located across the street from the iconic Capitol Records building along a bustling stretch of Hollywood and near a subway stop along the region's Red Line (close to the intersection of Hollywood and Vine streets). The area has seen a boom in low-rise, wood-framed apartment blocks in recent years, but has had a hard time getting taller—and therefore, more controversial—buildings approved for construction, including the troubled Millennium Hollywood project. That project, located around the corner from 1755 Argyle, has been plagued with delays itself due to fears that its dual 39- and 35- story towers might be located above an active fault line. It is still unclear if the Millennium Hollywood project will move forward, but 1755 Argyle is currently under construction and expected to open for occupancy in 2018.

Disco Isn't Dead

A recently-revamped proposal for new retail and hotel project in West Hollywood by Los Angeles-based architects Hodgetts+Fung and West Hollywood-based developer Faring Capital has taken a turn toward preservation. The proposal originally intended to demolish a historic gay culture monument occupying the site of the Robertson Lane project, replacing the structure with a pedestrian-oriented, 250-room hotel and retail complex.
That monument, known as “The Factory,” is a formerly-industrial brick structure built in 1929 to house manufacturing facilities for the Mitchell Camera Corporation. After the camera film manufacturer relocated their operations in the 1946, it underwent a series of transformations, eventually being converted in 1974 into a gay nightclub called Studio One. The discotheque become a safe space for the gay community during an era which inclusive, open environments were scarce. It also was seen as a beacon for rising consciousness, when it hosted the country’s first major AIDS research fundraiser in 1984.
The Factory was listed on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's “11 Most Endangered Historic Places” list in 2015 alongside New York City’s South Street Seaport and the Grand Canyon. The designation, a powerful tool for moving public opinion toward preservation, no doubt helped the developer’s position toward the structure evolve to incorporate reuse. Hodgetts+Fung’s revised plans involve moving and rotating the structure 90 degrees so that it’s longest facade is aligned with the streetfront. Under this arrangement, The Factory will become the entry point for a paseo bisecting the site, instead of being demolished by it.
A timeline for the project has not been released.

Le Monde a l’Envers

Legend of sixties-era utopianism, Francois Dallegret and Los Angeles-based French architect Francois Perrin have brought their traveling retrospective of Dallegret’s work to the Woodbury School of Architecture-operated WUHO Gallery in Hollywood. The exhibition, Le Monde a l’Envers / The World Upside Down, is funded by grants from The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, The Canadian Center for Architecture, The Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, and Dorothy Lichtenstein. It was first shown at the Architectural Association in London in 2011. Using 1960s-era supergraphics and photographs, wall-hung furniture prototypes, and historical ephemera, the exhibition brings to light Dallegret’s ambitious and playful oeuvre, focusing extensively on his fascination with the handmade and the automated. Dallegret is most well-known for his monumentally complex and bubbly Graphos pen illustrations for Reyner Banham’s essay “A Home is Not a House,” a project whose popularity has seemingly eclipsed a much wider and considered body of work. But Dallegret has been consistently busy since the 1965 essay, having designed fluttering windmills for Montreal's Expo 67, modular park seating and light fixtures for the 1976 Olympic games, and various light installations throughout Canada and France in the decades since. Regarding the start of his career in France, New York, and ultimately Canada, Dallegret told AN, “I was totally on my own, I didn’t read anything. I still don’t read very much actually, and I was just doing my own thing. I was interested in automobiles and mechanical stuff, so it all became embedded in my drawings.”Dallegret’s ever-youthful, media-diverse, and experimental career benefits from the retrospective format. Perrin, curator and designer for the exhibition told AN, “There’s obviously way more materials we could be showing, but we made a careful selection [of Dallegret’s work]. It was difficult budget-wise to bring prototypes and original drawings, so the idea was to create a narrative through the images by blowing them up, so you are immersed in the work.” That experiential quality is picked up from Dallegret’s work, directly, as nearly all of the projects displayed relate to their use relative to the human body, from Banham’s bubble to a crucifix-shaped bed, to pack of cigarettes the designer was commissioned to do in his adopted homeland. When asked about the body-focused aspects of his work, Dallegret said “I was working alone, so the only guy I could use for my drawings was me. So, I used myself in most of the drawings and set ups showing the devices I invented and et voilà.”The exhibition points to tensions inherent in social and technological change via the sometimes sarcastic musings Dallegret imbues in his work. His use of then-new industrial materials—the bent sheets of aluminum for the multi-use Chaise Ressort chairs, the inflatable rubber inner tubes and brightly-colored anodized aluminum sections in his Automobile Immobile car prototype—point toward new aesthetic modes rooted in industrial production. In these works, Dallegret seems to poke fun at the inconsistencies of his era’s essential privileges, leisure and mobility, by designing a lounge chair that does the work of two and by crafting a car that can’t go anywhere without blowing a tire. King of the French curve, the Montreal-based designer’s works are also marked by the sinuousness inherent in the plastic materials of the Space Age. His design for a restaurant called Le Drug from 1967 uses molded wire mesh sprayed with concrete to create bulbous and continuous booths and tabletops while stylized air supply ducts hang down from the ceiling. Dallegret also makes extensive use of collage and relies on the inherent re-thinking of scale resulting from piecing together found images in a pre-Photoshop era to imbue his work with its characteristic insight and sass. His brand of analog, appropriative, scale-challenging aesthetics and conceptual approaches, like the Rape à Fromage tower, for example, which supposes a residential function for a super-scaled cheese grater, would certainly be at home in many of today’s graduate schools of architecture. For these reasons, there is an oddly contemporary quality to the work presented in the exhibition, a fact that is not lost on the still-active Dallegret himself. No word yet on where the exhibition heads after its L.A. run, but Dallegret has plans for a future furniture-related exhibition with new prototypes in the works. Dallegret’s retrospective is on view at WUHO Gallery in Hollywood through June 26, 2016.

Golden Globe–winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow has unveiled plans for a private club in West Hollywood with a design by California-based Gensler. "The Arts Club," as it will be known, is touted to cost $3,000 a year, and will occupy a 132,000-square-foot plot.
The club includes a wellness center, night club, selection of restaurants, creative office space, gallery, cinema, and 15 guest rooms. A multi-story underground parking garage will also be located on Hilldale Avenue.
The club hopes to emulate the successes of the SohoHouse private club that originated in London in 1995. SohoHouse has since expanded to New York, Chicago, and West Hollywood.
According to Curbed LA, the club will take the place of the former Hustler building on the Sunset Strip. That structure, owned by Larry Flynt, had occupied the space for 18 years. The adult magazine will move its offices to Hollywood Boulevard. In a marked transition, Paltrow has reportedly deemed the club a no swearing zone.

As for Gensler's design, the nine-story building uses a vertical aluminum fin system that pivots upon axial fittings attached to the building's facade. Besides the aforementioned amenities, the rooftop terrace will be the building's main attraction, offering a luxury pool with a view over L.A.

Paltrow's dream isn't quite ready for construction yet, however, as the proposal still awaits permission for various aspects of design, notably the structure's height.

Leong Leong was selected to design the master plan and new buildings for the Los Angeles LGBT Center in Hollywood. The pair's resume includes fashion house Philip Lim as well as the design of the United States Pavilion of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale.
The firm is known for using common materials in uncommon ways, with results that belie humble beginnings: a sleek facade composed of mirrored louver blinds, sound insulation foam transforms into a chic wallcovering.
The new project is their biggest commission to date and includes a 183,700-square-foot facility and a campus plan that, with the existing building, covers more than a city block and includes 140 units of affordable housing for seniors and young adults, 100 beds for homeless youth, a new senior center, retail space, a center for homeless youth, and an administrative headquarters. The scheme will be centered on a series of courtyard spaces and plazas.
The Los Angeles LGBT Center and housing developer Thomas Safran & Associates chose Leong Leong from a shortlist of five firms, which included Michael Maltzan, Frederick Fisher, Predock Frane, and MAD. The commission is a collaboration between the firm, executive architect Killefer Flammang Architects and landscape architect Pamela Burton.
“The design concept is to create a mosaic of unique spaces and programs that—together with The Village at Ed Gould Plaza—will form a cohesive campus along McCadden Place. We hope the project will become an urban catalyst for the neighborhood, connecting residents, clients, staff, and neighbors alike,” says Chris Leong.

Rumor has it that Michael Maltzan Architecture (MMA) is hard at work on a triangle-shaped Malibu home for one of Hollywood’s biggest names. The MMA crew is keeping mum on the client, but we’ve heard it’s not an actor. Geometric coastal living for a director or producer, perhaps?
According to Michael Maltzan's website:

Malibu’s coastline is defined by an unbroken band of residences; their repetition and consistency of scale reduces the individual house to a stripe in this striated border separating the Pacific Coast Highway from the expanse of the ocean...
The form of the Broad Beach Residence arises from the confluence of these circumstances. The house consists of a single bar punctured by a tapered form that expands towards the ocean. As visitors pass through the threshold of the bar, the building’s form maximizes framed views to the western horizon by extending the visual limits of the house to embrace the ocean beyond. The residence’s formal inflection scales the domestic in counterpoint to the horizon. Simultaneously, the form creates a more consensual relationship between the residence and the beach, between public space and private space, and between the perception of scale and its physical form.
This spatial infiltration is mirrored in the sectional overlap of the public beach and private space of the home. Sand slips like a carpet under the floating mass of the house, a thin stair slumps from the structure to the beach floor, and a heavy mass rises out of the sand to support the main volume above. As the angular form faces towards the water, it carves out twin courtyards that flank the interior spaces and restore a middle-scale to the composition at the edge of the land.

Art and architecture book nirvana Hennessy + Ingalls closed its Hollywood location on Sunday after just six years in business. The store had been situated in a bow truss structure inside Space 15 Twenty on Cahuenga Boulevard, just north of Sunset.
"It's been a struggle from the get-go," said store owner Mark Hennessey, who bought the location a few months before the economy collapsed and finally "decided to pull the plug" after Space 15 Twenty substantially raised the rent.
"People are still buying books but they're not buying them in bookstores," he added. "We need a new generation of architecture and design lovers. Right now they're not coming in as often."
Hennessy + Ingalls will maintain its Santa Monica location, which Hennessey said is the largest of its kind in the country, but he acknowledged that he's been looking for smaller, more affordable space in Los Angeles's Arts District.

The Pacific Design Center (PDC), designed by Cesar Pelli, is celebrating its 40th year, and last week it wrapped its biggest yearly event, Westweek, which featured panels, lectures, and the debuts of furnishings and interior resources from over fifty companies.
We just learned from Curbed LA and the LA Times that the PDC's new Red Building, which opened in 2013, just signed its first three tenants (which will include retailer AllSaints and media company Whalerock), occupying 65,000 square feet of the 400,000 square foot building. Despite this recent track record, PDC developer Charles Cohen hopes to build an ambitious new project, called Design Village, on the Metro-owned bus yards adjacent to his property.
According to Curbed, the complex, designed by Gruen Associates, would include 335 residential units, a 250-room hotel, a movie theater, outdoor amphitheater, and restaurants, clubs, and bars. But they report that WEHO city council has voted to asked Metro not to extend their contract (set to expire next month) to Cohen, so the project seems likely to remain unbuilt.